Whenever there is scandal in or near the White House, expect to find Rove’s footprints.

Rove appears to be the choreographer of the latest Justice Department disgrace: the perfectly legal firing of eight US attorneys for the transparently revolting reason that these career Republicans would not compromise their own judgment — not to mention justice — in order to dance to the tune of the White House, which wanted the attorneys to go after Democrats and protect Republicans no matter what the facts.

Even by Washington’s cynical standards, this is a perverse innovation. But perversity, of course, is the stock and trade of the Bush presidency. Bush and his henchmen have polluted public life with lies about Iraq, and corrupted the constitution with the illegal measures they call the war on terror. So what’s another outrage?

What compounds this particular fury is that the Bush-sponsored Patriot Act, which is supposed to protect the nation from foreign terrorists, provides a loophole that allows the White House to replace US attorneys without the review and approval of the Senate. All things considered, this is political perversity of a truly inspired kind.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, was the designated Scooter Libby for this one, and he’s already resigned and taken the blame. Calling on Gonzales to resign is almost beside the point. To say that he should go is a no-brainer. Gonzales should never have been named — or approved — in the first place. His role as architect of Bush’s torture policy should have disqualified him.

Events in Washington are moving into a phase where the contours of a number of interlocking scandals are becoming increasingly clear. With Donald Rumsfeld gone, Vice-President Dick Cheney under a perpetual cloud, and Libby awaiting sentencing, attention is focusing on Rove.

Not quite two years ago — at about the same time that White House counsel Harriet Meyers was suggesting that Bush fire all 93 US attorneys (yes, that’s the same Harriet Meyers whose loyalty the president tried to reward with a spot on the Supreme Court) — a Justice Department investigation in Guam, a US territory in the Pacific, got under way. That investigation involved possible shady doings by now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and was derailed when President Bush removed the supervising prosecutor in a surprise move that raised a few eyebrows but did not seem to connect with any larger political reality.

The political reality is different today. And it does not seem a stretch to ask what Rove’s role was in these events. Could this once-obscure offshore investigation provide the long-rumored but so far elusive link between the corrupt, influence-peddling Abramoff and the unindicted, influence-wielding Rove?

Perhaps it will be more elusive but just as interesting to determine how involved Rove was with the removal of Bud Cummins, the former US attorney for East Arkansas, and the naming of his replacement, Timothy Griffin, a former aide to Rove. According to an e-mail from Sampson, Gonzales’s former chief of staff, “It was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.” that Cummins get the job. Why? Could it be that a well-placed US attorney could resurrect Whitewater allegations to be used against Senator Hillary Clinton if her presidential campaign gathered threatening momentum — threatening, that is, to the Republicans?

Two years ago, when the Bush White House was secretly contemplating the sweeping politicization of the Justice Department’s prosecutors, such questions would have seemed out of line, impertinent, even crazy. Today they seem to be frighteningly on target. If the lies that produced the Iraq War can be considered a soft form of presidential authoritarianism abroad, then should we consider Bush’s perversion of the government’s prosecutorial power at home an equally dangerous form of tyranny? Following Karl Rove’s footsteps will help the nation understand the answer. Expect the worst.

Immoral no more
The chairman of the Joint Chief’s of Staff, Marine Corps General Peter Pace thinks homosexuality is immoral. Fair enough, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, even if it is a bit old-fashioned. And adultery? That’s immoral too. The general did not offer a hint as to his thinking on sex between unmarried individuals. But we suspect he might take a dim view of that as well. Faced with the prospect of so much immorality among the nearly two million troops under his command, we have a suggestion that just might elevate the moral tone of our armed forces. Since the military has its own set of laws called the Uniform Code of Military Conduct, we suggest the armed services take a bold step and legalize gay marriage. With as many as 65,000 gays and lesbians now serving in uniform, it would give those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and airwomen, not to mention marines, a chance to do the decent thing by getting hitched. It might create another set of problems by increasing the pool of potential adulterers, but nobody said that life was easy. The military is justly proud of its record as a social trailblazer. Relatively speaking, it is more racially integrated and gender diverse than even the most politically correct elite universities. So why not join the state of Massachusetts and blaze another trail? Military gay marriage. Remember, you read it here first.